Welcome to our unschooling blog. We hope you enjoy reading about our adventures without schooling!

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

June Nature Study: Birds

We've finally made it back on the focused-nature-study bandwagon! Last month, we decided to head back over to one of our favorite homeschooling resources, the Handbook of Nature Study blog to check out the June Outdoor Hour Challenge. We decided to focus on our own backyard and, while we can boast of many bird visitors, we have one bird in abundance: chickens!

We started off by observing our girls while they scratched around in the run. We took our colored pencils and sketchbooks with us and focused on their heads, tails and feet:

In this one above, Syler was really intent on capturing all the intricate details of the comb, the waddle, the ears, and especially the four toes.

Violet sounded out the work "chicken" all on her own. I believe the second word is "beak."

The next day, we collected feathers from the run and labeled them. Sy was able to make out the quill, the fluff and the barb of a tail feather (above).

Violet found a wing feather and was able to distinguish between the quill and the fluff.